{"id":2974,"date":"2025-10-06T21:03:15","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T21:03:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/technomads.maginei.com\/?p=2974"},"modified":"2025-10-07T11:30:53","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T11:30:53","slug":"paris-day-18-versailles-day-2-the-palace-grounds-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/technomads.maginei.com\/?p=2974","title":{"rendered":"Paris Day 18 – Versailles Day 2 (part 2) – The Palace & Grounds"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Rain Stopped, Time To Head To The Gardens<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Fountains & Hedges Everywhere<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Into the hedges.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Random statues here and there.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Not quite a maze like in the movies, but not easy to keep oriented either as it spans many acres.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Each fountain has a theme. This fountain is about one of the seasons (not sure which).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Hedges connect each section.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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They startup the fountains every hour or so. We missed this one.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Acres and acres of hedges.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Apollo fountain.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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You can see this fountain from the Palace. It’s the premier fountain in the gardens. Louis XIV was the “Sun King” (ie Apollo).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Another fountain of Apollo. Keep in mind that Louise XIV was Apollo. Given how he died this makes sense to me as a metaphor.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Once we figured out the fountain schedule we tried to hit as many fountains as we could before they shut them off. We were able to get to four fountains in 15 minutes! Pretty good if you know how far apart they are. We literally ran between fountains \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This was the most magnificent of the fountains.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

These fountains were “out of order”, but were neat in that they’re actually representations of dance moves back in the that time period. They were modernized to provide some sort of cool light show to go along with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On another note, given all of these fountains they must have had a pretty sophisticated mechanism to pump water. I imagine all of these fountains could be run at the same time. Not sure how they would have managed that 300 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Neptune fountain.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Note the buzzard head protruding from the guy in the snail helmet’s face. I’m guessing they had drugs back then too.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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You can see the scale of the Neptune fountain here.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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This was a pretty fountain.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Sea shells in Paris. Must have imported these.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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A statue right next to the Neptune fountain. I get why they hid this at the back of the gardens.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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And It Keep Going<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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I swear, the French must be the best gardeners in the world. I can barely keep one drip feeder system working.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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We missed the fountain show on this one. Bummer.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Carriage Museum<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It was just across the street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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You mess with me, you get the dogs.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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A little model of a royal carriage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Looks pretty plush!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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When you don’t have horses, but you have humans.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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I think Napoleon used this carriage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Bad quality, but shows how they handled for snow and ice. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Opera House<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Opera House was just down the road from the Carriage Museum. And it was a free tour day! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Heading Back Home<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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YAAT – Yet another amazing thing on the way back home. Only so many hours in the day…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What a day! We were running on empty on the way back home to Paris. Here are some pictures on the way to the train station back. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A funny (slightly terrifying) situation arose as we got to the train station. K and I were confused as to how exactly to get back home. The train was open in the station and we just had to figure out if we should get on it. The train started to make sounds like it was about to leave so we grabbed hands and headed into the train car. I let go of K’s hand as I entered the car, and to my surprise (horror) K wasn’t right behind me! The door closed! I turned around to look out of the window. K was not looking happy LOL! I tried to push a button on the door, but no luck, the door wasn’t opening! I didn’t want to start hitting buttons and accidentally hit the emergency button, so I just stood there looking at K trying to figure out what to do. She’s a quick thinker and told me to get off at the next stop. I nodded and gave here a thumbs-up and we met up at the next stop. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve never been in a situation like that and it was a bit shocking, but everything worked out fine \ud83d\ude42 K said that she tried to push the door open as it was closing on her and it wasn’t stopping, so she stopped trying to push through it. I guess the doors on the RER trains are less forgiving than the Metro trains where you can nudge the door to stay open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ll do another post with the videos from our trip to Versailles next. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Rain Stopped, Time To Head To The Gardens Fountains & Hedges Everywhere Once we figured out the fountain schedule…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2959,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-paris"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/technomads.maginei.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/technomads.maginei.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/technomads.maginei.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technomads.maginei.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technomads.maginei.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2974"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/technomads.maginei.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3062,"href":"https:\/\/technomads.maginei.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2974\/revisions\/3062"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technomads.maginei.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/technomads.maginei.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technomads.maginei.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technomads.maginei.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}